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The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.